But there were also years in which Dahl stood in the front rank of his age, and even showed it the way to new aims. He certainly held that position from 1820 to 1830 in those pictures in which, instead of making romantic adaptations of Ruysdael and Everdingen, he resembled them by rendering the weirdness and eeriness and the rough and wild features of Norwegian scenery: red-brown heaths and brownish green turf-moors, stunted oaks and dark pine forests, erratic blocks sown without design amid the roots of trees, branches snapped by the storm and hanging as they were broken, and trunks felled by the tempest and lying where they fell. In certain pictures in the Bergen and Copenhagen Galleries he pointed out the way to new aims. The tendency to gloom and seriousness which reigns in those Dutch Romanticists has here yielded to what is simple and familiar, to the homely joy of the people of the North in the crisp, bright day and the wayward sunbeams. He loves the glimmer of light upon the birch leaves and the peacefully rippling sea. Like Adrian van der Neer, he studied with delight the wintry sky, the snow-clad plains, and the night and the moonshine. He began to feel even the charm of spring. Poor peasant cots are brightly and pleasantly perched upon moist, green hills, as though he had quite forgotten what his age demanded in "artistic composition." Or the summer day spreads opulent and real between the cliffs, and the warm air vibrates over the fields. Peasants and cattle, glimmering birches and village spires, stand vigorously forth in the landscape; even the execution is so simple that with all his richness of detail he succeeds in attaining a great effect. It is felt that this painting has developed amid a virgin nature, surrounded by the poetry of the fjord, the lofty cliff, and the torrent. In the same measure the Dutch had not the feeling for quietude and habitable, humble, and familiar places. And perhaps it was not by chance that this reformer came from the most virgin country of Europe, from a country that had had no share in any great artistic epoch of the past. [Illustration: MORGENSTERN. A PEASANT COTTAGE (ETCHING).] _Caspar David Friedrich_, that singular painter who carried on his artistic work in Greifswald, and later in Dresden also, is, if anything, almost more original and startling. Like Dahl, he studied under Eckersberg, at the Academy in Copenhagen, and it was this elder artist who opened his eyes to nature, in which he saw moods and humours as romantic as they were modern. His work was not seen in a right light until shown in the German Centenary Exhibition of 1906, when his just place was first, in the history of art, assigned to him.